Women in the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries: Society

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WOMEN IN THE 16TH, 17TH, AND 18TH CENTURIES: SOCIETY

GARY KELLY (ESSAY DATE 1996)

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DAWN KEETLEY AND JOHN PETTEGREW (ESSAY DATE 1997)

SOURCE: Keetley, Dawn and John Pettegrew. "Introduction: Part I: Identities through Adversity." In Public Women, Public Words: A Documentary History of American Feminism, edited by Dawn Keetley and John Pettegrew, pp. 3-7. Madison, Wis.: Madison House Publishers, 1997.
In the following essay, Keetley and Pettegrew discuss the challenges that women colonial dissenters faced.

The first European settlers in New England brought with them family structure that vested authority unambiguously in the hands of the father. Woman's place in this "patriarchal" institution was clearly delimited; less autonomous individuals than wives and mothers, women throughout the North American colonies were subject to an intricately organized hierarchy that placed them below father, husband, brothers, and even adult sons. Unable to inherit either the land or the offices of their fathers, women became virtually invisible in the public life of the thirteen colonies. With its strict gender stratification and divisions of labor, the patriarchal family served as a model for and basis of social and political relations and institutions. In the 1637 trial of Anne Hutchinson for dissent from the Puritan church, for instance, the issue of Hutchinson's revolt against the subordinate status of women was inextricable from her religious rebellion. As one of her accusers proclaimed: "You have rather bine a Husband than a Wife and a preacher than a Hearer; and a Magistrate than a subject"—thus drawing a direct line between Hutchinson's religious unruliness and her perceived political and sexual disorder.

Patriarchal power in the colonies was not absolute, however. Due to the centrality of the household in an agrarian, primarily subsistence economy, women did create important economic and social roles for themselves. The case of Margaret Brent illustrates both how women could gain some power in the political sphere of colonial life, and also how the law inevitably circumscribed that power. In 1648, Brent petitioned the Maryland Assembly for the right to vote, an unprecedented act that was nevertheless in keeping with Brent's active legal and political career. She never married and frequently served as her brothers' business advisor and legal representative. A major landowner in her own right, Brent also represented herself in court cases, and for her acumen she was named the executrix of Maryland's governor—a close friend—when he died in 1657. It was on the grounds of her legal right to protect the former governor's interests that Brent sought the vote. Although her request was denied, the record shows that Brent "protested."

Aside from the economic and legal actions of a handful of prominent, land-owning women, the first stirrings of feminism in the colonies were the individual acts of rebellion against one institution—the Puritan church. Dissenting women, however, necessarily challenged those other institutions from which religion was inseparable, notably family and gender. Paradoxically, these early feminists drew their power to challenge established religion and the sexual hierarchies it instituted from Puritanism itself. Religious dissenters in New England carried the Puritan idea of the "aloneness" of believers in their relation with God so far that even the ministry became an obstacle to faith. "Grace," which was located within the self, accrued liberating possibilities in that it potentially challenged the hegemony of the clergy—the powerful elite of both church and state. The radical potential of the individual and its corollary—the spiritual equality of each individual regardless of sex—caused tensions in a society based on female subordination and finally created an avenue for women to question that subordination. The assertion of one's inner feeling of God's grace, of a distinctly personal revelation, could be used to justify rebellion against any and all of the authoritarian structures in which the individual was situated. Conversely, any woman who questioned the church was also perceived to be disavowing her place in secular and family life, of transgressing even her sex. In subsequent centuries it was this "wayward" and radically individualistic Puritan woman who would become an icon of the feminist individual, challenging a culture that on the one hand celebrates individualism and on the other hand limits, by gender and race, its realization.

One major strand of dissent was the Antinomian heresy, in which Anne Hutchinson played a central part. Antinomianism placed the private experience of religion above the formal rules of orthodox Puritanism, stressing that questions of salvation were decided between an individual and God, without the intervention of ministers. Hutchinson came under attack from the Puritan clergy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony precisely because of her defiance of their authority; she held meetings in her home every Sunday to discuss the day's sermon, even as rumors began to circulate that both the religious and political leadership were being criticized. Ordered to appear before a convocation of ministers, Hutchinson was ultimately excommunicated and banished; she and five of her six children were killed by Indians five years later on Long Island.

Another strand of religious dissent in colonial North America was Quakerism. Like the Antinomians, the Quakers believed in the "Inner Light"—rather than the authoritarian, institutional structures of the church—as a means to truth and salvation. The Society of Friends empowered women through their belief in spiritual equality and also in the development of co-equal status in church organization, including encouraging women to preach. The women's movement of the nineteenth-century was in part made possible by the legacy of Quaker women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; indeed, a large number of the first nationally-known women's rights advocates were Quakers, including Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B. Anthony.

One of the most prominent of early Quaker women was Mary Dyer, who exemplified the Quaker belief in religious freedom and also non-violence, two values that would persist and flourish within the women's movement. Like Hutchinson, Dyer was tried and convicted in Massachusetts for religious dissent; she became the only woman executed for defying the Puritan authorities. Dyer protested, specifically, the 1658 Massachusetts law that banished all Quakers from the colony on pain of death. She had come to Boston after the passage of the law in order to support two friends who were imprisoned; after being banished twice by the authorities, Dyer returned to Boston, refusing to leave peacefully after the magistrates executed her friends and fellow Quakers. Accusing the magistrates of "disobedience," Dyer warned them in a letter of 1659 of the dire consequences of their sins. She paid for her challenge to Puritan authority and for her convictions about the freedom of conscience with her life.

When trying dissenters, Massachusetts courts inevitably delivered a sentence of banishment, forcing "heretics" into areas beyond the bounds of the Puritan theocracy such as Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. In a sense, this banishment functions as a metaphor for a second legacy that early American rebellious women bequeathed to subsequent generations of feminists: an oppositional or "liminal" impulse—an unruly existence, in other words, beyond the pale of established structures. Whether by choice (as in the case of the religious dissenters) or not (as in the case of Mary Rowlandson, forcibly removed from her town by Indians), some colonial women lived outside the confines of patriarchal society. While they spoke from beyond the literal and institutional borders of their culture, however, these women shaped and changed that culture, contributing in part to the loosening of oppressive hierarchies.

Perhaps the epitome of the liminal woman—of her social marginality, of her occupation of the borders of society—is the figure of the witch. Accusations of witchcraft reflect the anxiety of a culture that anticipates its own dissolution and thus demonizes and expels that which it fears is the cause of incipient social breakdown. Often that "culprit" in colonial New England was the independent, unmarried woman, more frequently the victim of witch-hunting than any other group. Carol Karlsen has added that "witches" were often women without brothers or sons—women, that is, who "stood in the way of the orderly transmission of property from one generation of males to another."¹ Clearly having gained enough power to provoke such deep-seated fears in the first place, the "witch" was at the same time a victim of those social processes that she defied.

Both Susannah Martin and Martha Carrier were victims of the Salem witchcraft "hysteria," which began in 1692 when a group of adolescent girls claimed to be possessed and began naming several of their neighbors as having consorted with the devil. Out of the 200 people (mostly women) who were accused of witchcraft in Salem during the course of the summer of 1692, thirteen women and six men were finally executed.

Some of the women executed as witches at Salem were clearly nontraditional women who did not conform to ideals of Puritan womanhood. A contemporary, Thomas Maule, for instance, estimated that two-thirds of the accused in the Salem witchcraft trials had either rebelled against their parents or committed adultery. Certainly, women accused of witchcraft were often on the margins of society, frequently unmarried and sometimes with a history of outspokenness. Susannah Martin had been involved in altercations with her neighbors; she expressed anger toward her accusers at her trial, using her own reading of the Bible to try to discredit them. Martha Carrier, charged with at least thirteen murders, had argued with neighbors over land and threatened a male antagonist with physical violence; in her examination, she charged the magistrate as the only "black [i.e., satanic] man" she had seen and insisted that she be believed over a group of hysterical girls. Like Mary Dyer, Martin and Carrier died because of their integrity; the public legacy of all three women helped to ensure that the execution of "deviant" women in New England would not last.

That women began to develop a distinct identity and voice in colonial America was a prerequisite for the subsequent emergence of a collective and public feminist movement. Only as women began to define and represent themselves could they start to transcend gender roles imposed from without by the state, the church, the law, and other social and cultural forms. Women in America first found a public voice and identity through religion, again discovering, paradoxically, a certain amount of freedom in the system that also oppressed them. Puritanism incorporated an emphasis on self-scrutiny, often in the form of written conversion narratives and spiritual autobiographies, in which one would detail personal struggles on the path to salvation. At a time when women had virtually no social or institutional frameworks within which to express themselves, written or spoken words of religious introspection and nascent subjectivity became the first step to subverting patriarchal discourse and power.

Two of the earliest autobiographies by women in America were those of Mary Rowlandson and Elizabeth Ashbridge, both of which began to shape women's distinct consciousness and individuality. Published in Boston in 1682, Mary Rowlandson's narrative tells the story of her three-month long captivity by the Naragansett tribe of Native Americans. Rowlandson's account of her experience with the Naragansetts is one of the earliest of the captivity narratives, regarded by some as the first distinctively "American" literary genre. In her account, Rowlandson is clearly directed by the Puritan belief in the providential nature of the colonists' encounter with the Indians; she interprets each event as part of God's divine plan to test his "chosen people" through their encounter with the "evil" natives. Placed in exigent circumstances, however, Rowlandson's individuality—separate from the Puritan orthodoxy—starts to emerge; she finds her own food, makes things to trade with her captors, and even shifts her opinion about Indians, refusing to recognize them as simply evil.

Elizabeth Ashbridge quite literally creates herself anew in her autobiography of 1774; there is virtually no record of her other than that which her own hand transcribes. Evidence suggests that Ashbridge was authorized by her local Quaker meeting at Goshen, Pennsylvania, to travel and to preach and that it was generally acknowledged that she spoke with an increasingly authoritative voice. Ashbridge's text is a spiritual autobiography—the story of her struggle to achieve grace and a divine life, a story given symbolic expression in the dream she has of a woman bearing a lamp. As a Quaker, Ashbridge's "lamp" is, of course, the Quaker "Inner Light" that Mary Dyer died for over a century earlier; it is also the light of personal faith for which Anne Hutchinson was excommunicated. Like both Dyer and Hutchinson, Ashbridge's story is not just a quest for spiritual freedom though; her text, makes explicit her challenge to patriarchal institutional authority in secular areas of life such as the family, a challenge that was more covert in the religious struggles of Hutchinson and Dyer. Ashbridge's search for her personal truth is undertaken not just in the face of male-dominated religion but also in the face of tyrannical social and sexual relations, and her trials include, an exploitative master and a coercive, abusive husband. Finally, Ashbridge does achieve not only freedom of conscience but also a relatively autonomous identity.

Another literary genre at which women excelled in the colonial period was poetry, which was originally a distinctly masculine discourse in Puritan New England. Women poets not only stepped into the public sphere themselves, giving future women writers intellectual forebears, but they also carried on women's cultural work of defining their own subjectivity, making their own preoccupations part of the store of public knowledge. Anne Bradstreet first encroached on that terrain in 1650 when her book of poems, The Tenth Muse, was published in London, the first book of original poetry written in America. Publicly challenging the preconception that poetry was a masculine endeavor, Bradstreet asserts in "The Prologue" that "I am obnoxious to each carping tongue / Who says my hand a needle better fits." In both "The Prologue" and "The Author to Her Book," Bradstreet reflects on and defends her own role as a woman poet. Like proponents of women's education in the late-eighteenth century, Brad-street insists that her intellectual work is not incompatible with domestic duties and child-rearing.

About a century after Bradstreet issued her volume of poetry, Phillis Wheatley became the first African-American to publish a poetic work, her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). Wheatley's poetry was a distinct assertion of subjectivity at a time when most Anglo-Americans believed that African-Americans had none; there was even a "hearing" shortly after publication to determine if Wheatley was in fact the writer of the poems, since intellectual output from a black woman and a slave at that time was considered scarcely credible. Wheatley's writing, then, began to replace the patriarchal constructions of women—especially African-American women—with their own authentic self-constructions. Wheatley's poetry, however, contributed to political issues other than the subjectivity of women and slaves. "On Being Brought from Africa to America" expresses a spiritual vision that necessitates an equality between the races inimicable to the institution of slavery. And "The Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth" reflects Wheatley's interest in the politics of the pre-Revolutionary ferment. Her poetry represents, albeit somewhat obliquely, the first entry of an African-American woman into the political issues of slavery and British imperialism.

To write about "feminism" in the colonial period is to commit somewhat of an anachronism; and those few historians who have even broached the topic of feminism in early America do so tentatively. The "disorder" of colonial women was not, after all, directed self-consciously against the collective situation of women as women. Anne Hutchinson is probably closest to such an ideal, as she did specifically argue for the right of women to exercise religious freedom and as she drew a crowd of largely female followers. (A contemporary of Hutchinson wrote that "'the weaker sex' set her up as 'a Priest' and 'thronged' after her.")² But these early rebels and intellectuals laid the groundwork for future feminist action—daring to transgress their allotted place, daring to oppose patriarchal authority within the institutions of the church and the family, and daring to move into masculine literary territories. Colonial women developed, in great adversity, an individuality that they expressed publicly.

Notes

Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York: Norton, 1987), 116, 213.
Lyle Koehler, "The Case of the American Jezebels: Anne Hutchinson and Female Agitation During the Years of Antinomian Turmoil, 1636-1640," William and Mary Quarterly 31 (1974): 61.

JANE DONAWERTH (ESSAY DATE 2000)

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

ON THE SUBJECT OF…

CASSANDRA FEDELE (1465-1558)

Cassandra Fedele was the first Italian woman writer to engage, publicly and independently, in scholarly discussions of morality, philosophy, education, literature, and politics, and was a steadfast and vocal proponent of the education of women. Fedele was born in Venice, Italy, and as a child was tutored—by her humanist father and others—in a variety of subjects, including Latin, Greek, classical literature, and rhetoric. By the age of sixteen, Fedele had established herself as a humanist and liberal arts prodigy, and was invited frequently to speak before various audiences of learned men.

In 1487, Fedele's cousin graduated with honors from the University of Padua—the center of learning for Venetian scholars—and Fedele presented a public oration on Latin, which was subsequently printed at Modena, Venice, and Nurenberg. The widespread publication and popularity of her oration led to Fedele's correspondence with numerous scholars, religious leaders, and educators worldwide, including the king of France, Pope Alexander VI, and Spain's Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, who invited her to join their court. Although Fedele entertained the Spanish monarchs' invitation, the Venetian senate prevented the twenty-two-year-old Fedele from accepting it, claiming that the state could not afford to lose her. Fedele presented a public oration in praise of literary scholarship before the Doge and senators of Venice, and her last oration, in 1556, was delivered in honor of the visiting Queen of Poland. When she died in 1558, Fedele was honored with a state funeral. The majority of Fedele's letters and her three public orations are collected in Letters and Orations (2000), edited and translated by Diana Robin.

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EVE RACHELE SANDERS AND MARGARET W. FERGUSON (ESSAY DATE JANUARY 2002)

SOURCE: Sanders, Eve Rachele and Margaret W. Ferguson. "Literacies in Early Modern England." Critical Survey 14, no. 1 (January 2002): 1-8.
In the following essay, Sanders and Ferguson discuss the wide range of levels of literacy that existed in sixteenth-century England.

Literacy, in the sixteenth century, was construed as multiple, variable, subject to redefinition by edict from above and by practices from below. The importance of regulating changes in skills and behaviors, in particular, increased reading of the Bible, was hotly debated as the Reformation got underway. In England, the Tudor state intervened erratically, first encouraging the reading of the English Bible for all, then forbidding its reading to all but a privileged few. In 1538, every parish church was required by a royal injunction to purchase an English Bible and place it in the choir.¹ The Great Bible, published in 1540 with a new preface by the Archbishop of Canterbury, stressed the ideal of an England peopled by 'all manner' of readers of Scripture in the vernacular: 'Here may all manner of persons, men, women, young, old, learned, unlearned, rich, poor, priests, laymen, lords, ladies, officers, tenants, and mean men, virgins, wives, widows, lawyers, merchants, artificers, husbandmen, and all manner of persons, of what estate or condition soever they be, may in this book learn all things'.² Only three years later, however, in 1543, the self-vauntingly named Act for the Advancement of True Religion and for the Abolishment of the Contrary attempted to undo that opening of the floodgates by lowering them again to allow for only a trickle of elite readers to have access to Scripture. Reading the Bible in English was prohibited outright for women, artificers, journeymen, serving-men of the rank of yeoman and under, husbandmen and laborers; noblewomen and gentlewomen could read the Bible silently; only noblemen, gentlemen, and merchants were permitted to read it aloud to others.³

The contradictions of that early effort to police reading and writing, the contentitiousness of it signaled by backtracking on earlier initiatives, provide a window onto the topic of this special issue of Critical Survey and its theme of literacies in early modern England. The interjecting of social categories into the debate over scriptural literacy indicates the breadth and complexity of concerns stimulated by greater access to books by a greater portion of the population. In the emerging brave new world of cheap print and increasingly widespread skills in decoding vernacular texts, who would be allowed to read what? And to whom? How would various social rubrics—sex, marital status, age, occupation, wealth and class—determine who would have entry to institutions in which books were read in more or less formally determined ways? The list of no less than twenty-two different categories of potential Bible readers (men and women, young and old, learned and unlearned, etc.) invoked by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer illustrates by its exhaustiveness the mixed and uneven nature of the skills and approaches that reading designated at that time. In the hands of 'priests' or 'lawyers', in those of 'tenants and mean persons', or of 'virgins, wives, and widows', the Bible—or any other book—would have been read with different levels of fluidity, different accents, different purposes, assumptions, pleasures.

This volume presents a collaborative effort to investigate the implications of literacies (in the plural) for early modern culture. We speak here of 'literacies' because the phenomenon under scrutiny in these essays resists reduction to the kind of mono-lingual three R's (two R's if numeracy is excluded) often taken for granted today as a quantifiable standard for use in economic development programs, a standard for measuring uniform 'basic skills'. In early modern England, as the work of a growing number of scholars has shown, acquiring the ability to decipher, sound, and reproduce the letter of the emergent, not-yet-standardized national language was far more variegated, both in its procedures and in its results, than previously understood or acknowledged. Reading and writing took place in two stages, the second of which never arrived for the majority of young learners, those who would have had to abandon schooling for economic or ideological reasons about when they turned seven, the approximate age at which instruction in writing and the rudiments of Latin grammar began for the privileged rest (poorer children were expected to dedicate their labor to their families at that age; girls of all classes faced the additional hurdle of prescriptions discouraging female writing).⁴

ON THE SUBJECT OF…

MARGUERITE DE NAVARRE (1492-1549)

An important figure in the transition between medieval and Renaissance literature, Marguerite de Navarre was one of the first women in Europe to write fiction. She is best known for L'Heptaméron des Nouvelles (1559; the Heptameron), a series of stories, or "novellas," primarily concerned with the themes of love and spirituality. Marguerite received a classical education and became particularly interested in literature. She moved to court when her brother became the King of France in 1515, and immersed herself not only in the social pleasures of court life but in diplomatic responsibilities and intellectual opportunities as well. Marguerite moved with her second husband, the King of Navarre, in 1527, to Navarre, an independent kingdom located between France and Spain. She continued her political activity, engaged in charitable work, and became a patron of the arts.

The stories in the Heptameron are framed by a narrative in which ten travellers—five men and five women of various ages and social roles—are stranded in an abbey in Navarre after a bridge is washed out, and entertain themselves for a week by storytelling. Both comedic and tragic, the stories concern love, marriage, adultery, and human weakness; they offer glimpses of aristocratic, monastic, and common life in the sixteenth century, and suggest a critical perspective on the inequities that emerge from differences in class, gender, and political power. The Heptameron has been praised primarily for its psychological realism and complex narrative structure. Recent scholarship focuses on the disruption of social expectations through the transgression of proscribed gender and class roles, depicted in many of the stories, as well as Marguerite's own position as an female author in the Renaissance.

Different type fonts and forms of script shaped different experiences of literacy. Letters learned by beginners were printed in Gothic type. Roman type, for them, was near-unreadable code. So, too, were various forms of handwriting, including the most common, italic and secretary, scripts more advanced writers alternated between or combined into a 'mixed hand'.⁵ Factors such as these—varieties of script forms and type fonts, kinds of language instruction ranging from English-only to classical Latin and Greek, variable access to kinds of books and tiers of educational institutions—all helped the emergence of multiple literacies in this period: reading-only literacy, scribal-literacy, English-only literacy, vernacular foreign-language literacy, Latin-literacy, scriptural literacy, heraldic literacy, legal literacy, etc. Moreover, the relatively standardized English of the printing press, which helped serve the Protestant nationalist agenda of the Tudor state, still had to vie with rival languages, Irish and Welsh, and with its own regional variants. To illustrate that point, the printer William Caxton recounted the story of an English merchant who was rebuffed when he found himself in a different region of England and tried to purchase 'eggys' from a local household.⁶ The word meant nothing to the farmwife who answered the merchant by saying she didn't speak French (in her dialect the word was 'eyren'). As this anecdote conveys, a transaction as simple as the purchase of eggs between residents of different English shires could be frustrated by lack of a common vocabulary. English itself was multiple, a designation for a host of regional dialects that emerged as a national language only gradually through concerted efforts at standardization, uniform curricula, state supervision. Moreover, as Cranmer's crisscrossing categories—sex, marital status, age, occupation, wealth and class—of potential Bible readers indicates, the varied literacies of different social groups applied in overlapping ways to the same individuals. Early moderns found themselves at the interstices of competing languages, symbolic systems for writing and deciphering them, social, institutional and professional settings requiring particularized textual and linguistic competencies.

The work of our colleagues and our work in this area contributes to a still-forming field. Literacy studies, along with the related fields of the history of reading and the history of the book, center on a set of connected topics: acquisition of reading and writing, variable practices of those skills, books and documents as material artifacts. This domain is capacious enough to accommodate the work of scholars in many disciplines, both in the social sciences and in the humanities, and to foster as well an unusual degree of information sharing and collaboration between disciplines. From our particular vantage points within that larger field, literacy studies matter outside of the contribution they make to our knowledge about reading and writing as central cultural practices in the history of much of the world (nearly all of it if we include post-Colonial history). From where we stand, from our positions as teachers in departments of English, we believe that literacy studies matter also because of the new perspectives they bring to our understanding of familiar subjects (writers, readers) and objects (books, manuscripts) of literary studies. Materials and approaches made available through literacy studies are enabling crucial reconceptualizations of received literary tradition. As a growing body of research shows, works that literary scholars have always studied—poems, plays, prose romances, sermons, letters, diaries—take on new dimensions and meanings in the context of broader changes in language and society that shaped the writing, acquisition, circulation, and reading of such texts.

This questioning of literature via literacy has sparked disagreements and debate; it has also furthered among a number of scholars a consensus about several points. First, 'literacy' is in need of redefinition. The term requires updated explanation if it is to refer usefully to the specific configuration of practical skills, in potentially multiple languages, differentially valued, that reading and writing present in a given society. Second, literacy, if we use the singular to denote the phenomenon in a general sense, was in the early modern period a domain of social contest. Most of the population of Europe between the fourth and the eighteenth centuries was unable to read or write in any language; literacy conveyed status in sixteenth and early seventeenth-century England precisely because the majority lacked advanced instruction (schooling beyond the elementary level) at a time when ordinary dealings increasingly required it (selling livestock, answering legal charges, participating in local government, etc.).⁷ Finally, for all of the disparities it helped to consolidate, particularly with respect to those who lacked writing, literacy was also a source of unanticipated agency for readers. The market for books, partly responsive to the purchasing preferences of readers, gave book buyers some influence over titles and content; moreover, the uses to which readers put what they read were unpredictable, often contrary to expectations, implicit or explicit, on the part of authors or censors.

The essays in this volume present a diversity of perspectives on early modern literacies. Together, they illustrate the work of redefining literacy currently ongoing in the field. Mary Ellen Lamb's analysis of the play The Old Wives Tale challenges the notion that literacy and its social distribution can be understood in binary terms: literacy versus illiteracy, men versus women. She argues that that representation of literacy as a polarized phenomenon did not reflect a social reality but rather a social agenda. The very coinage 'old wives' tales' reflects a bias to promote Latinate classroom culture over and against the culture of oral narrative. In her view, literacy was a multiple phenomenon rather than a single one conceptually defined against 'illiteracy', not only because there were gradations of difference between more or less educated individuals, which were not keyed invariably to sex, but also because even the Latin-based grammar school was not impervious to oral culture, ballads and old wives tales, narratives linked with illiteracy and the illiterate. Works by writers ranging from George Peele to Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare testify to the lasting traces of orally-transmitted narratives even on minds schooled in humanist classrooms. Similarly, Janet Starner-Wright and Susan Fitzmaurice challenge the notion of a hard and fast divide between print and oral cultures. In their discussion of The History of Edward II, published in 1680 and believed by many modern critics to have been written by Elizabeth Cary, the authors argue that Cary, like other history writers of her day, draws upon conventions of print publishing interchangeably with those of traditional storytelling, mixing Latin phrases with proverbial sayings.

This destabilization of existing social and cultural categories by writers and readers shows why literacy was a site of contest. In her study of Roman capital letters, Bianca F.-C. Calabresi argues that uppercase letters, which evoke classical tradition and royal decrees, had the effect of bestowing dignity and high status on those who learned to form them (uppercase letters were considered an advanced skill that could be acquired only after mastering that of writing lowercase ones). To take the example of the forged letter that appears in Twelfth Night, Maria's use of Roman capitals in inscribing that document displays her social aspirations and, indeed, achieves them in part. As Elizabeth Rivlin also reminds us in her reading of The Comedy of Errors, the fact that literacy was perceived as a marker of hierarchy made it also an instrument for upsetting hierarchy. The drama, then, highlights the conflictual dimensions of literacy by heightening our sense of how ambiguous writing can be as a marker of position, hence how indeterminate or superficial also the nature of social standing itself. Judith Rose explains that among Quakers requiring women to write down their prophecies constituted a means of restricting their expression: 'once women's prophecies were written down, they could be censored, witheld, or circulated only in manuscript; they were therefore more manageable, less incendiary'. Following the Restoration, however, what had been a source of restriction during the Civil War era turned into a force for enabling women's expression when Quaker schools, unlike other educational establishments, included writing on the curriculum for girls. Ironically, innovations introduced as instruments for the containment of one generation provided another with tools for social mobility and intellectual training.

The shift in perspective that brings into clearer focus the activities of Quaker prophets, old wives and man servants, also brings to our attention the behaviors of readers, another previously under-examined category of participants in literate culture. Previously, only the author or the text (after the proverbial 'death of the author') was ascribed proprietary rights over meaning or play of meaning; more recently, due to the painstaking work of many scholars, the reader now is understood to have played a crucial role as well in working out the meanings texts accrued. Readers were not (and are not) passive recipients of content; they argued with the texts they read; they emended and corrected them, cut from the pages elements they found valuable or objectionable; they added to them their own owner marks, marginal comments, insignia, poems, unrelated notes and scribblings.⁸ Often, readers formed associations and at times larger social networks through their reading. In the roles of consumers, they exerted influence as well over textual production. As Jennifer Hellwarth demonstrates, early modern midwifery manuals give clear indication that their authors, male medical practitioners, though dismissive of midwives, nevertheless were reliant on a female readership for information and financial support. This point about the agency of the reader arises in a more figurative context in Rivlin's essay. She notes that one of the servants in Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors is shown at first to be a passive recipient of blows that inscribe his body as a text, as 'if the skin were parchment and the blows … were ink' (3.1.13); however, the servant then asserts his own explanation of those marks—his own bodily text—and emerges as an independent reader-interpreter. The humor of the scene depends not only on the mercurial qualities of the identities of the two pairs of identical masters and identical servants but also on those of writing itself, at once indelible in its mark and unstable in its meaning.

'Reading, viewing and listening', Roger Chartier has commented, 'are, in fact, so many intellectual attitudes which, far from subjecting consumers to the omnipotence of the ideological or aesthetic message that supposedly conditions them, make possible reappropriation, redirection, defiance, or resistance'.⁹ The present collection of essays adds to our understanding of the subjective and social dimensions of literate practices, their availability to personal and communal adaptation and innovation. Scholars, as readers themselves, interpret newly texts that have been read differently before; in so doing, they redefine meanings and concepts in ways that may go against doxical or ideological definitions. The definitions of literacy emerging from current discussion among scholars in this field are multiple, provisional, and often counter-intuitive. They are opening conceptual territory for newly important types of evidence (the marked copy of a book rather than the clean copy, the margin along with the central text, the 'paratext' or prefatory materials preceding the 'main' text) and newly shared questions: is it possible to measure literacy with any precision if we define it to be multiple and compound? In early modern England, how did literate practices participate in the formation of the self? (And, in this age of computer literacy, how do they continue to do so to this day?) What is the relation between literacy and literature? These questions continue to be the work of many volumes and many scholars. They point the way to some larger implications of the multiple literacies documented here.

Notes

Joan Simon, Education and Society in Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 175.
C. H. Williams, ed., English Historical Documents 1485-1558 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 827.
H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers: 1475 to 1557 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 27.
W. J. Frank Davies, Teaching Reading in Early England, 1973; rpt. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1974.
Keith Thomas, 'The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England,' in The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, ed. Gerd Baumann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 97-131.
Margaret Ferguson discusses the anecdote and its implications for the linguistic diversity of English in her book, Dido's Daughters: Literacy, Gender and Empire in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Caxton tells the story in the preface to his translation of Virgil's Aeneid (Eneydos, as Caxton's title has it) published in 1490.
Keith Thomas points out that in early modern England, 'It … became increasingly common to require that holders of local offices should be literate and to discharge them if they were not.' Moreover, literacy was an asset in commercial transactions as well, since 'anyone involved in business ran the risk of being cheated if he could not read a document or a set of accounts' ('The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England,' in The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, ed. Gerd Baumann [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986], 110).
In his 1473 English translation of a French collection of philosophers' sayings, The Dictes and Sayeings of the Philosophers, Caxton acknowledges the proprietary attitudes of contemporary readers toward their books when he recommends that any reader offended by certain misogynistic maxims of Socrates (omitted by the translator and reinserted by Caxton) simply remove that passage, 'wyth a penne race it out or ellys rente the leef oute of the booke'; for the reader's convenience, Caxton printed the passage as a detachable appendix at the back of the book (cited by Susan Schibanoff, 'Taking the Gold Out of Egypt: The Art of Reading as a Woman,' in Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, eds. Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986], 85). Stephen Orgel provides the example of an owner of Holinshed's Chronicles who added to his copy heraldic shields of families figured in the narrative; a subsequent owner of the volume cut out some of the shields ('Records of Culture,' in Books and Readers in Early Modern England. Eds. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002], 282-9).
Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988), 41.